So I started reading Eyes Wide Open yesterday. It’s a bind-up of four novellas, which are the first “book” of a series called the Outlaw Chronicles. I guess because the back cover blurb and the first chapter are about a 17-year-old girl named Christy trapped in a coffin, I was expecting the entire book to be about the few precious minutes she has before her oxygen runs out. That is not what the book is about. The book is not even about the race to get her out of that coffin.

I haven’t finished the full bind-up yet, but spoiler alert for the first novella. In Identity, Christy accidentally breaks into the psych ward of a hospital. That’s fine, right? No big deal. She explains who she is and she gets out. But in a psych ward, no on believes you. How many crazy people think they’re crazy? So she’s stuck there, because no one will believe that she’s not crazy.

And then it hits you. What if she is crazy? What if she really did make the whole thing up? What if Christy is simply an unreliable narrator, but you didn’t realize it until this point just because you are so sure she’s sane?

That wouldn’t have been such a shocking development, except that then I began to wonder. How do I know I’m sane?